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| Kanika Datta: Tourism ministry's crash course for change | | Commonwealth Games will be much more than just a testing point for Indian athletes; it will put modern urban Indian culture under the microscope too |
| Kanika Datta / New Delhi Feb 04, 2010, 00:50 IST |
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In November last year, the tourism ministry took a decision to start a programme to “sensitise” Indians to the needs of foreign tourists ahead of the Commonwealth Games scheduled for early October. The idea may have stemmed from a similar exercise by the Chinese government just before its Olympic extravaganza.
It won’t be too unfair to predict that this well-meaning effort by the tourism ministry will meet with little success. One reason is the time frame: it’s going to be unleashed in six months, the ministry says. That means the ministry will have just five months before the Games to modify behaviour patterns in Delhi and other tourist locations that are expected to enjoy spin-off benefits.
This brings us to the second problem. For China’s government, the behavioural issues were mainly limited to ordering people not to spit at random (the Chinese, like Indians, compulsively expectorate), and providing tips on how to help foreigners. Long before this, many Chinese started to learn English.
In a sense India has a huge advantage over China in that English is not an alien language for most urbanites. But there are much bigger problems that a five-month crash course is unlikely to change. One is basic cleanliness. Most Indian visitors to China will testify to the almost septic cleanliness of that country — and not only in the gleaming big cities of Beijing and Shanghai but in the pretty smaller towns as well. China’s urbanisation is not just faster than India’s, it’s more civic-minded. No Indian city, and Delhi is not an exception, can credibly make even a small claim to cleanliness.
Certainly, the initiatives that are being taken to beautify the Capital scarcely look transformational in that respect. All around those parts of Delhi that will come under the Games’ footprint, much industry and effort is being expended on such facilities as footbridges (that inherently indisciplined Indians rarely use), street-lighting (badly needed) and unnecessarily replacing paving stones that are in perfectly good order. Bizarrely, no one’s making any effort to address two of the most obvious civic problems: garbage and the serious lack of public toilets. We sorely lack both, which is why Indians tend to litter and treat their cities like giant public urinals.
The first problem has a simple and inexpensive solution: providing more garbage disposal bins at more frequent intervals. The “sensitising” issue for the tourism ministry will then be limited to teaching people to throw their trash into these bins.
The solution to the second problem is not hugely expensive either, and funds for it could be easily diverted from whoever is pointlessly replacing undamaged paving stones on footpaths. According to Sulabh International, a four-seater toilet complex costs under a lakh and a ten-seater Rs 9 lakh to build. Judging from the way shauchalayas are run, their extremely nominal fee and commendable standards of cleanliness, constructing more of them at strategic points could contribute hugely towards the city’s long-term cleanliness.
If cleanliness is one aspect of the sensitising problem, safety is another. It is ironic that the tourism ministry initiative was announced less than two months before reports of a nine-year-old girl being molested in the tourist Valhalla of Goa. The incident revived an issue that erupts every tourist season with disheartening regularity. Urban safety in general remains an issue that few local governments in India care to tackle, and the record on women’s security is even worse. As a result, India is rapidly being branded as an unsafe destination for women around the globe.
All this means that the tourism ministry has, in short order, to make urban Indians both more civic-minded and more liberal-minded in the space of five months. The first may yet be achieved if the right initiatives are taken and rules enforced.
The question of changing attitudes towards women will be no mean challenge since it will entail a deep-seated cultural shift. The process, however, is not helped when elected government officials exhort women not to be “adventurous” (Chief Minister Sheila Dixit when a young TV journalist was found murdered in the early hours) or attribute rising incidents of rape to women wearing bikinis (Goa’s tourism minister).
Indians often point to China’s totalitarian rule as a reason for its clean and safe cities. In truth, all responsible local governments enforce rules — even the most liberal of western democracies. That is probably why they continue to attract most of the world’s tourists. In 2008, France attracted 79 million tourists and the US 59 million tourists. China wasn’t far behind at 53 million. India’s record in that year: 5.3 million (an all-time high, by the way).
The Commonwealth Games, therefore, will be much more than just a testing point for Indian athletes. It will put modern urban Indian culture under the microscope too.
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